


Honeysuckle and Tears

by Whuffie



Series: Breaking the Wall [1]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Dragon Age Inquisition, Liddy - Freeform, Thom Rainer, Thom Rainier - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-30
Updated: 2015-07-30
Packaged: 2018-04-12 03:48:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4464320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whuffie/pseuds/Whuffie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thom Rainier (later known as Blackwall) is just a boy when his sister gets very ill.  This is a short drabble about his life as a child and insight into the last day he'd spend with Liddy.</p><p>Warning: Minor character death / death of a family member.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Honeysuckle and Tears

“Come on, Liddy.”  He was taller now, and could reach the top shelf where the toys their mama carved for them were always stored.  Papa didn’t want them playing with them all the time because he said mama didn’t have the time to carve any more with two children and so much to do.  Thom didn’t understand that, but mama did seem like she was always doing something important.  He accepted his parents’ explanation without question, so they took special care of the carved toys like wooden soldiers which nobody else in the village had.  “We’ll be careful, right, Liddy?”  They weren’t going to hurt them, and he desperately wanted his little sister to play with him the way she always did before winter.  She slept so much now, and complained about being cold.    
  
He hooked a finger around the leg of a wooden deer and gingerly tugged it down into his waiting arms.  It was dusty, and he lovingly brushed it off.  Liddy always liked this one, but papa was afraid the legs were too fragile.  “She’ll be careful.” He whispered a promise to the ornately carved creature as he pet it, “she won’t hurt you.  Liddy wouldn’t hurt anyone ever.”    
  
She was all wrapped up in a blanket when she shuffled into his room.  “Thom?” she squeaked uncertainly, staring at him with round eyes the same color as his, “Papa said we shouldn’t play with those.”  
  
“It will be alright.  You’ll be careful, won’t you?  So will I.”  He stretched up to his tip toes and caught hold of a wagon wheel.  It had an ox to go with it, but the horn got broken off when Liddy was just a baby. That had been when their papa put the special toys away and out of reach.  Instead, mama sewed Liddy dolls and gave them blocks, tops, and books which were bought in the market to play with.  It also wouldn’t be much longer, papa said, until Thom was ready to start learning a little about swords.  He was already starting to grow tall, and his parents predicted he’d inherit his fathers brawny shoulders and size.  
  
“We might get in trouble.”  She crept up to the fire and huddled in the halo of warmth, rubbing her button nose and watching him.  
  
“Not if we don’t tell.”  He finally found his favorite, and took the griffon down.  The wooden men all looked the same, but in his imagination, some of them were Grey Wardens.  He always liked the stories about them, and wished he had a dragon for the carved soldiers to fight.  He didn’t, but he cradled all the toys against his chest as he went over to the hearth.  “Are you sure you want to sit here?  Liddy, it’s summer.  It’s boiling in here.”  
  
She nodded too solemnly for a girl who was so young and wrapped her blanket tighter around her shoulders.  “I’m still cold.”  
  
A tiny part of him knew, even though he was still a child, that something was really wrong with his baby sister.  There were always people coming to the house and talking in hushed whispers about it.  They looked at him from the corners of their eyes as if they were worried he might overhear something.  None of the adults, even their parents, told him anything.  He’d sometime find his mother with her eyes red and wet or father with a grim expression.  Neither of them explained, but mama would hug him tight for no reason before she sent him outside.  Even a boy could get worried when he instinctively knew something wasn’t right, contrary to everything his parents said.    
  
“We’ll play by the fire today,” he told his sister and handed her the cart, ox, and deer.  “That will keep you warm.”  
  
She smiled tremulously and they played make believe for what felt like a long time to them, creating castles with blocks and recreating imaginary sequences which were inspired from books or stories they’d heard.  Muffling their giggles so their parents wouldn’t overhear, they spent almost an hour with the forbidden toys.  They dared not keep them longer out than that, because mama came to check on them a lot during the day and papa at night.  Not wanting to get caught, Thom put the toys back on the shelf and took down one of the few books their family owned.    
  
Liddy yawned and her breath wheezed with a wet rattle in her chest.  “I’m tired.  Let’s play later.”  It wasn’t even time for lunch, yet, but she slept a lot lately.  
  
“I’ll get you some things so you can lay next to the fire for a little while.”  Fretful about her loss of energy so early in the day, he fetched a pillow and extra blankets.  Folding them so she could lay on them instead of the floor, he helped her get comfortable, and tucked her in the way mama and papa always did.  “You rest.”  He tried to sound very grown up, but didn’t think he did a very good job.  When her eyes drifted closed and she went to sleep, he wanted to keep a vigil over her, but no matter what his best intentions, his attention suffered the pangs of youth.      
  
Not able to stay still any more, he got up and went to play outside.  He climbed fences, pretended a wooden plank nailed into a tree was a mighty fortress besieged by dragons which he slew, trotted down by the river, skipped stones from the bank, followed a turtle until it pushed into itself the water, and decided to ask his papa to take him fishing soon.  He always liked doing that, and it was time the two of them spent doing something together.  This time, he’d ask if Liddy could come to, once she was better.  Thinking of her, he picked a stalk of blooming honeysuckle from a clump of grass.  His sister liked the way it smelled and it would cheer her up.  
  
Looking at his long shadow, he realized the sun was high and he was hungry.  It had to be well past noon meal.  Why hadn’t mama called him?  He scrambled over a fence and ran back to the house, worried that he’d missed something.  “Liddy?  I brought you something,” he called.  
  
The sad bright blue eyes of his father met him and he put a heavy hand on Thom’s shoulder.  “She’s not here, son.  The healers came and took your sister away.”  
  
“Oh.”  Papa couldn’t say any more than that, and it was the first time he could remember seeing his father cry.  Tears were rolling silently down his weathered face and into his thick beard, which scared Thom.  Papa never cried.  He laughed and filled the whole house with fun when he played with them.  Confused, Thom went into Liddy’s room and laid the flower on her bed.  She could find it there when they brought her home.  
  
Except she never came back.    
  
For over a week he went to the river and picked honeysuckle to leave on the window sill so her room would smell nice and she’d find it.  He’d look for her and ask his parents when she was going to come home, but all it did was make mama cry harder.  Papa never laughed any more, and the people with the soft voices stopped coming to see them.    
   
Nothing he did made her come back, not his prayers to the Maker, how many times he asked his parents, begging the Chantry sisters, or watching out the window when his papa walked in the door from a trip to the market.  He cried a lot when nobody was looking, and one day his papa found him snuffling on the edge of Liddy’s bed.  
  
An arm warmly draped over narrow shoulders as his father sat down next to him.  “Son,” he told him seriously, “sometime there’s nothing you can do.  Liddy was sick, and no matter how much we want to change things, we can’t.  There’s no use in trying, and it’s best to just walk away from it.  You may not understand all that now, but you will when you’re older.”  Putting his arm around the child, he hugged him tight.  “At least I’ve still got my boy, right Thom? That’s what’s important right now.”  
  
Except it wasn’t the only thing which was important, and Thom learned the hard way that it was better not to try at all.  If he didn’t do anything, then he wouldn’t start to hope.  If he didn’t hope, then it wouldn’t hurt as much when he failed.  On the ninth day, he stood in front of the window. Tears ran down his cheeks as he crushed the last honeysuckle flower in his fist and walked away.

**Author's Note:**

> This was a prompt from Tumblr that I couldn’t pass up. We don’t know much about young Thom Rainier from the canon game, how he grew up, what his relationship was like with his parents, etc. We know he had a sister who died and it must have traumatized him because Cole picks up on it. We also know his father was alive for at least part of Thom’s life because if you befriend him (non-romance) he tells a story about a dog that was hanged to death by some local boys. He mentions how he could have told his father if you pick a certain answer on the wheel. Otherwise we don’t know much about him.
> 
> Which made me wonder about his childhood. The death of any child in a family would be traumatic, and by Cole’s enigmatic comments, we know how hard it hit Thom. That made me consider what kind of trauma and scars it would have left on him, and if it might have had something to do with who he ended up becoming, years later.


End file.
